Towards an analysis of academic weblogs

Abstract

This paper analyses both the communicative purposes and formal linguistic features of academic weblogs. An initial analysis of 496 weblogs in use within tertiary level institutions was reduced to an in-depth analysis of 39 academic weblogs (a corpus of 16 million words). The objective was to see how much variation there might be between traditional academic genres and academic weblogs. The initial hypothesis is that academic weblogs are far less formal and would favour greater use of lexico-grammatical realisations belonging to the interpersonal function of language. In order to quantify this possible variation between traditional academic genres and academic weblogs, some well-known linguistic features which have been considered to be typical of academic discourse such as the agentless passive and nominalisations were investigated.